LiveRamp’s acquisition by Publicis: what the battle for the advertising identifier means for brands

By Michael Froment, CEO and Founder of Commanders Act

On May 17, 2026, Publicis announced the acquisition of LiveRamp for $2.2 billion — a roughly 30% premium on the share price, and the third-largest acquisition in the group’s history. The deal made headlines for its size. What deserves more attention is the question it implicitly raises: why would a company whose business is buying ad space for its clients acquire a company that manages digital identifiers?

The answer says a lot about the state of the digital identity market, and about how strategic this infrastructure layer has become for the entire advertising ecosystem.

How the advertising identifier market ended up without a standard

For twenty years, the third-party cookie quietly powered digital advertising. It let you recognize a user across sites, deliver a consistent message across channels, and measure that an ad seen here led to a purchase there. The system was imperfect and contested, but it worked.

Then browsers started dismantling it, one after another: Safari, Firefox, then Apple’s ATT, which wiped out the IDFA on 60 to 75% of iOS devices. GDPR restricted its use in Europe to the point of making it often unusable without explicit consent. And Chrome — which still accounts for 60% of the browser market — announced, then postponed, then reconsidered removing third-party cookies, leaving the market in years of uncertainty.

The result: an advertising ecosystem built entirely on a shared identifier now finds itself without one. And the players best positioned to define what replaces it are fighting a multi-billion-dollar battle — as the Publicis-LiveRamp deal shows.

Why brands need a reliable advertising identifier

Three concrete problems arise for brands the moment a stable identifier is missing.

Customer journey continuity. The same user visits your site on mobile in the morning, sees an ad on desktop in the afternoon, and buys from a tablet in the evening. Without an identifier linking these three moments, you’re not managing three touchpoints of one customer — you’re managing three anonymous contacts. Your personalization, ad frequency, and performance measurement all depend on this.

Deduplication and measurement. Without a shared identifier, you can’t tell whether the same person saw your campaign on Meta, then on Google, then on a publisher site — and therefore can’t measure which exposure actually drove the conversion. You optimize on fragmented signals, in silos that don’t talk to each other. This affects adtech platforms just as much as brands and their media agencies.

Targeting and exclusion. Finding prospects who resemble your best customers, excluding those who’ve already bought, re-engaging an abandoned cart: these operations, central to any media activation strategy, require recognizing an individual consistently across systems.

Cookieless: why the entire advertising ecosystem is affected

The whole advertising value chain is involved, and every link suffers in its own way.

Publishers need an identifier to monetize their audience: an advertiser won’t buy what it can’t target, and anonymous inventory sells for far less.

DSPs and programmatic platforms need one to allocate budgets meaningfully in real time — bidding on an impression without knowing who will see it is buying blind.

Measurement and attribution platforms need one to trace the conversion path across touchpoints. Without it, measurement becomes approximate and contestable.

The digital identifier isn’t a peripheral technical issue: it’s the building block the whole chain’s coherence rests on. When it wobbles, the entire structure shakes.

Universal advertising identifier: a market still fragmented

The good news: the market has reacted. Several initiatives are trying to rebuild a stable, consented, interoperable identifier — RampID at LiveRamp, UID2 at The Trade Desk, ID5, First-ID in France, Utiq backed by European telecom operators.

The bad news: this fragmentation reproduces exactly the problem it claims to solve. An identifier compatible with some publishers but not others. An identifier that works with some DSPs but not Google. A deterministic solution that covers logged-in users but not anonymous ones; a probabilistic solution that covers everyone with degraded accuracy.

The Publicis acquisition of LiveRamp adds another layer of complexity: an agency now owns the identity infrastructure used by its direct competitors. LiveRamp’s neutrality — until now its main selling point — has, since May 17, become the first question Omnicom, WPP, Dentsu and Havas are asking themselves.

First-party data: the foundation that doesn’t depend on the advertising identifier market

At Commanders Act, we see that the teams best prepared to navigate this period aren’t the ones who bet on the “right” market identifier. They’re the ones who first built a first-party data foundation solid enough not to fully depend on how this battle plays out.

The digital identifier is a collective issue that will — or won’t — get resolved at the market level. First-party data, on the other hand, is something you control yourself, starting today. The two are complementary, but one can wait for the market to settle. The other can’t: identifier solutions will eventually emerge, but they’ll be of no use to you if your first-party data collection isn’t ready to receive them.

About the the author